What's in Your Toolkit: Two (former) Computer Engineers Talk Marketing

Anand Thaker, CEO and Founder of IntelliPhi, cohosts the Talking Stack podcast and contributed to the now 6,829-company MarTech Landscape Infographic. Intelliphi develops strategies, technology, and training for cognitive and data enabled marketing, sales and customer support.

Martech marries marketing and technology, creating, managing, and using digital tools to to automate tasks, facilitate data-driven decisions, measure marketing activity impact, and drive more efficient market spend. Anand comments that Martech is not just about marketing and sales enablement. In a deeper sense, it is about understanding human nature and how we connect with each other.

Companies that market need to evaluate and understand:

• their own organization and how they interact with customers,
• how customers engage with the brand,
• what gaps exist in the current processes,
• what opportunities are being missed,
• what data do they need that they don't have, and
• long term and short term goals and how those will be achieved

Customer data platforms (CDPs), unified customer databases accessible to other systems, provide structure to enable companies to better manage customer and prospect data, understand how the company and these clients engage and interact, and facilitate the appropriate application of AI to the whole body of data. For those using AI, it is important to understand how it learns and what it can and cannot do.

Anand can be followed on Twitter @anandthaker, or connect with him on LinkedIn or on his website at anandthaker.com